SAN FRANCISCO -- At Oracle Team USA's lowest and most desperate moment, when the team was down by seven points and had just lost yet another two America's Cup races, Skipper Jimmy Spithill -- his jaws clenched as usual -- conceded that Emirates Team New Zealand has "almost got it in the bag."

Now, 11 days later, Oracle is unbelievably still alive, answering Spithill's rallying cry for "one hell of a comeback."

Facing elimination for more than a week, the home team has reeled off a stunning five wins in a row, the latest a convincing rout on Monday, in what's become the longest and one of the most thrilling regattas in the 162-year history of the America's Cup.

If the American team continues its startling momentum and wins the two scheduled races on Tuesday and one on Wednesday, it will retain the cup it won in 2010 and keep it in San Francisco.

"Oracle is going to do it, all the way, take my word!" said Barbara Scrivner, a nurse in Napa who has watched the races from America's Cup Park -- one of a million fans who have now attended San Francisco's summer of sailing. "They were so far behind. It's incredible how much power they've got to come up from this."

"This is torture," said New Zealander Denise McBeth, who has spent the last 50 days in San Francisco alongside thousands of Kiwis watching the 72-foot catamarans duke it out on the America's Cup race course. "The whole country is at a standstill."

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So how is this happening? How could a team that lost six of the first seven races go on to win the last seven of nine?

"They found their boat speed. They're making fewer mistakes, and they're winning the mental battle," said America's Cup expert Jack Griffin, who has been covering the regatta every day for his www.cupexperience.com website. "Oracle has really gotten into New Zealand's head."

Just before the America's Cup final match between the Americans and the Kiwis began on Sept. 7, when former Australian skipper John Bertrand was asked which team was favored to win, he said, "Nobody in the know knows."

While New Zealand's crew had to earn its way into the finals against defending champ Oracle by competing for weeks against Italy's Luna Rossa in the Louis Vuitton Cup, Larry Ellison's crew watched and waited -- and perhaps was slow to get up to speed.

The Kiwis quickly showed their dominance in the early America's Cup races, especially in their speed upwind that Spithill said was "a shock." At the same time, the Oracle team was sloppy in its maneuvers, slowing down the boat tremendously each time it tacked upwind or jibed downwind.

By Race 5, after a disastrous leeward mark rounding when Oracle Team USA lost its lead, the team swapped tactician John Kostecki, who grew up sailing on the San Francisco Bay, with four-time British Olympic gold medalist Ben Ainslie. With Ainslie and strategist Tom Slingsby, an Australian who also won gold last year, making the calls together at the back of the boat, Kiwi skipper Dean Barker joked that he hoped all those gold medals would get caught up in the rigging.

But at every news conference, Spithill continues to boast about the advantage of having the two men working together, instead of just having one tactician like the Kiwis do in Ray Davies.

The America's Cup is also a design competition, where the fastest boat almost always wins. At the beginning of the America's Cup finals, that boat belonged to New Zealand. But over the past week and a half, Oracle Team USA's boat has proven to be faster, both upwind and downwind. And that's another mental game Spithill plays, telling reporters every day how his shore team is working into the wee hours to improve the boat. When asked when Oracle will be happy with its boat and stop making changes, Spithill doesn't hesitate: "Never."

Since the regatta began, the American team has made far more changes -- 15 that have been certified by the measuring committee -- as New Zealand, which has made at least eight. Although the precise changes on the boats haven't been made public, Oracle at one point lopped off its bow sprit -- a pole at the front of the boat that supports a light wind sail -- to reduce drag and increase the speed on heavy wind days, then put it back on in light winds. On the upwind leg, which caused Oracle its worst problems in the past, the team started to either overtake the Kiwis or extend its lead.

Oracle Team USA has also had luck on its side. During Race 9, when New Zealand was leading, too much wind forced race officials to call off the race for safety reasons. In Race 13, when New Zealand was leading by a mile in the lightest breezes of the regatta so far, the 40-minute time limit on the race course expired, and the race was again called off. Each time the races were rescheduled, and Oracle won.

Oracle has faced its own challenges. A year ago, the team capsized its first 72-foot catamaran on its eighth day of training. The boat was nearly destroyed and set the team back three months during repairs. And just before the America's Cup finals began early this month, Oracle Team USA was docked two races by a jury that found the team cheated during the America's Cup World Series a year earlier when it illegally added extra weight to the team's 45-foot catamaran.

The team's long-time wing trimmer, who was caught up in the scandal, was ordered off the boat.

"A lesser team would have dropped the ball or split apart," Spithill said Monday. Instead, the team pulled together, he said. "The boys are incredibly fired up, and I've never seen them like this before."

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at Twitter.com@juliasulek.